meekay

Obama responds to FISA concerns

2008-07-11T17:31:39Z

Per MoveOn's request, I sent the Obama campaign a note yesterday about how his vote on the FISA bill is costing him supporters. Today they sent out a response. Since others have been kvetching about it as well, I thought I'd make it available here.

Dear Friend,

Thank you for contacting us and sharing your strong feelings about this important issue. Please find a statement from Senator Obama below.

We appreciate hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Obama for America,

---
Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. There is also little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders.

That is why last year I opposed the so-called Protect America Act, which expanded the surveillance powers of the government without sufficient independent oversight to protect the privacy and civil liberties of innocent Americans. I have also opposed the granting of retroactive immunity to those who were allegedly complicit in acts of illegal spying in the past.

After months of negotiation, the House passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year's Protect America Act. Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future.

It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I voted in the Senate three times to remove this provision so that we could seek full accountability for past offenses. Unfortunately, these attempts were unsuccessful. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.

It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives - and the liberty - of the American people.

----------------------
Paid for by Obama for America

Three down, five to go.

2008-06-18T17:40:13Z

CRN	Subject	Course	Section	Course Title	Campus	Final Grade
32082	ORGB	631	644	Leading Effective Orgs	University City	A
32429	STAT	601	644	Business Statistics	University City	A+

	Attempted	Earned	GPA Hours	Quality Points	GPA
Current Term:	3.000	3.000	3.000	12.00	4.00
Cumulative:	18.000	18.000	18.000	72.00	4.00

meekay @ 2008-06-11T14:14:00

2008-06-11T18:16:21Z

While walking down 16th St, I was passed by a motorcade of dark-colored Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows, packed with bodyguards, and a police escort.

I didn't know Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were in town.

More homeowner angst

2008-06-09T16:54:00Z

Remember my issues with the contractor next door and the retaining wall?

Apparently the owner of the house next door has decided to rip out the back yard and put in a patio instead. But she's not content to tear out just the turf. Apparently she's decided that the walkway shared between the two houses is a tripping hazard, because it has a few cracks and is uneven.

So her solution was to saw the walkway in half and replace her half with patio pavers. The contractor was ready to go with the masonry saw this morning when he and I talked about it, and I asked him to wait a day while I talked with her.

I called her just before lunch. Note that this is the first time I've spoken with her. It turns out she's a house-flipper, so only one of us is actually planning to still be living here a year from now.

The result of the conversation is that I'm going to meet with her tomorrow morning at 9am. She's going to make a pitch to me that the whole walkway should be replaced. I don't think it's in that bad of shape, but I'm a lot more willing to replace the whole thing than to saw the thing in half.

I need to have a look at the deed tonight, but I'm pretty sure the walkway, the stairs, the fence, and the alley are all shared property. Which means that all the affected parties need to agree before they can be modified. I'm also pretty sure that the contractor over there is working without a building permit, which wouldn't be necessary if they were only doing internal remodeling, but I have to wonder if this sort of thing qualifies as a change to the structure.

Oh, and it's also finals week.

Kathleen Sebelius

2008-06-06T19:04:27Z

Hillary may not be the only woman on the short list.

The next day, she did this.

meekay @ 2008-06-03T23:20:00

2008-06-04T03:21:11Z

Bring it, punk.

I don't have time for LiveJournal.

2008-06-01T03:02:30Z

A lot happened in the last week and a half.

Last Friday, vlynn and I went to go clay shooting with drewid and much of the wedding party. Afterward, Kelly and I met up with Linda and Dan to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Eh.

We arrived at home at 11pm to discover that the retaining wall in front of my house was missing.

Apparently, the new owner of the house next door had instructed the general contractor working on it to replace only their half of the wall. Without letting me know first. Anyone who has seen my retaining wall could tell you that if you removed half the wall, the other half was going to come crashing down. But apparently the contractor couldn't figure that out and so the whole thing came down.

Saturday morning I went out to have a chat with him. I told him that I wasn't upset about the wall coming down, since it needed to come down anyway. But I was upset that they hadn't tried to work something out with me first, especially since I'd been trying to work something out with the previous owner for months. And now that it was down, I wanted to make sure the new one put back up the right way, including fixing the part that hadn't yet fallen. And if that happened I was willing to contribute for my half.

He agreed to this, and then just to make sure I pulled out my camera and took a photo of the missing wall. He looked kind of worried and said (in his Irish accent), "Yer nae goin tae sue me, are ye?"

To which I responded, "Well, not if you fix my wall."

(By the way, as far as I can tell he's working without the proper permits.)

Saturday night, valerini and drewid got married. Also, drunk. The great thing about the wedding is I got to hang with both Philly people and Austin people who I haven't seen in years.

After the reception, Kelly and I stopped by Dracula's Ball for a while.

Sunday morning (ish), we went to Beau Monde for a crepe brunch. Then we headed back to Wings Field from which I flew us to Martha's Vineyard, MA. We arrived just in time to catch sunset while eating dinner on the deck of a tiki bar in Oak Bluffs. Kelly's posted photos from the trip.

Monday morning we had brunch at the Black Dog Tavern in Vineyard Haven, and then flew back to Wings.

My new retaining wall is almost finished.

meekay @ 2008-05-25T22:29:00

2008-05-26T02:29:38Z

Hello from Martha's Vineyard, MA!

meekay @ 2008-02-19T16:50:00

2008-02-19T21:50:26Z

We just rejected a candidate who misspelled "Lunix" on his résumé.
Also, he may have attempted to cheat on a homework problem we gave him.

Pros and Cons

2008-02-18T22:25:46Z

Con: My furnace broke down last night.
Pro: It was 65°F today.
Pro: vlynn and I had today off work anyway.
Pro: The furnace guy was able to come out today.
Pro: It broke the way I thought it did, which meant he was able to fix it in half an hour.
Con: That cost $250.
Pro: My Wii arrived a day early, so we got to play it over our vacation.
Pro: I don't have to work from home tomorrow to sign for it.
Pro: Kelly likes it.
Con: I have sustained my first Wii-related injury.

meekay @ 2008-02-12T13:19:00

2008-02-12T18:23:39Z

(The Politico) An attempt to strip lawsuit immunity for telecom firms which helped the government tap phone calls fell well short in the Senate, leaving liberal Democrats on the losing side of what they believe is a fundamental civil liberties debate.

There should be several other amendments to the FISA bill before it passes the Senate today, but the immunity vote was the critical issue for many Democrats, who believe telecom firms that helped the government carry out warrantless wiretaps should at least have a day in court. The Bush administration, almost all congressional Republicans and several moderate Democrats, believe that telecom firms should not be punished for responding to the federal government's national security demands.

The vote also provided an opportunity to showcase the key differences on national security between presidential candidates, as Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), voted against immunity for telecoms, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), voted to keep immunity in the bill. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) did not show up for the vote. All three candidates were in the Washington area for the region's three primaries today.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/12/politics/politico/thecrypt/main3821504.shtml

Basically, the Senate just handed Verizon and BellSouth a get out of jail free card for performing wiretaps on behalf of the government in situations they knew were illegal.

By the way, to his credit, Sen Bob Casey (D-PA) voted against immunity as well. Sen Arlen Spector (R-PA) voted against three amendments to remove the immunity provision, then introduced his own amendment that would make the government the defendant in any such case. It too was defeated.

Obama vs Clinton in Austin

2008-02-12T17:54:18Z

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama will debate Feb. 21 in Austin, two weeks before the critical Texas primary.

CNN will telecast the forum live from 7 to 8:30 p.m., and it will air in Spanish on Univision at 10:30 that night. It's sponsored by the Texas Democratic Party and will take place at the LBJ Library.

The winner of the March 4 Democratic primary in Texas could find a path to the presidential nomination. There are 228 delegates at stake in the state, the most of the remaining contests.

"Texas Democrats, as well as independents and even a few Republicans, have been motivated by the appeals our two highly qualified candidates have made to voters," said Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Richie. "Our 2008 primary may very well generate a record turnout of Texans who are eager for new leadership in the White House."

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/politics/national/stories/DN-debate_12pol.ART.State.Edition1.451e362.html

Oops

2008-02-11T20:50:37Z

I have a five-page paper due for my leadership class tonight. Unfortunately, about 11pm last night I came to the sudden realization that the paper I was writing was not answering what he was asking for in the syllabus. I ended up having to take today off work in order to finish it. I've only just finished the penultimate draft, and the due date for electronic submission is 6pm. For the next paper I'll need to plan ahead better.

This is a separate assignment from the leadership and gender thing I posted yesterday.

Kelly's in Chicago this week for a management seminar, so Taz is at my place making a ruckus and terrorizing the plastic mice. He was very concerned when I tried to sleep in this morning.

Leadership and Gender

2008-02-10T22:56:18Z

For my Leadership class this week, we had to read two studies on leadership and gender, and then comment in our class online journals. My entry for this week ran a bit long, but I thought others might be interested in it.

Subject: In which I talk a lot while saying little, yet incur the wrath of 51% of humanity.
Date: February 10, 2008 5:47 PM

I graduated with a degree in computer science. In 1998, there were approximately eighty people in my graduating class; four of them were women. The national average is currently a bit below 20%, down from a HIGH of 37% in the 1980s.

The abysmally low rate of women achieving degrees in the field has repurcussions after graduation as well. My company currently has seven developers (including my manager), all male. I don't believe we have ever even interviewed a woman for a development position; I know I've never reviewed any resumes (provided by recruiters) of women for pre-interview screenings for this company.

Why are there so few women in computer science and software engineering? Aside from hard-core misogynists, not many people believe that it's because women are somehow not up to snuff in the material -- especially now that girls and women are actually getting better grades in math and science than their male counterparts since the mid-1990s. The dominant theory is that an unconscious discrimination is occurring in academia and entry-level industry. Women are selecting themselves out of computer science, physics, and other such fields because they feel they cannot excel in an environment that rewards people for exhibiting maverick behavior, and using terminology and explanations that can only be understood by a relative few.

Another possible way to see this is: There are few women in computer science and software engineering because we've made programming a masculine job.

The first reading for this week makes a similar point, I think. This leadership emergence study had a quirk: It evaluated only all-female groups, in order to eliminate either physical sex or gender normative behavior as a variables. Instead, it evaluated the participants based on gender roles. Individuals were pre-evaluated for gender roles using the Bem Sex Role Inventory as well as basic intelligence (IQ), and then sorted into teams with similar compositions -- 1 each of masculine-intelligent, feminine-intelligent, androgynous-intelligent, and mixed personality. (No stupid people were harmed in the course of this experiment.) The teams were then assigned two types of tasks, initiating structure and consensus-building, which were intended to emphasize either the members' masculine or feminine personality attributes.

The results surprised the authors. Recall again that this was an all-female study. In both types of tasks, the women with either masculine or androgynous gender role types were more likely to emerge as leaders than participants with feminine personalities. The implication is that leadership emergence is more closely tied to masculine personality attributes than to feminine personalities.

This result seems contrary to the readings from a couple weeks ago, if we assume for argument's sake that the personality attributes associated with masculinity are more closely aligned with initiating structure and that femininity is more closely aligned with consideration. The readings at that time came to the conclusion that leaders were more effective by incorporating more consideration into their behavior than if they incorporated more structure. However, there are two points to consider when contrasting these two studies:

1. The previous study was about leadership effectiveness, but used only employee grievances and turnover as the output variables.
2. This study measured leadership emergence, but did not evaluate whether, for instance, the leaders with androgynous personalities did better than those with masculine personalities, because they were able to incorporate both structure and consideration into their leadership behaviors.

I think the study can thus be summarized as: The act of BECOMING a leader is a masculine job (but not necessarily a male one). However, once someone is already a leader, how does gender affect their performance?

This is what the second study attempts to answer, although in my opinion it does a poor job. First of all, using a meta-analysis of previous studies as a basis is questionable at best, especially in a field where a well-documented social bias can put a major dent in your objectivity.

Nevertheless, the second study came to the conclusion that men and women (note the basis on physical sex) have similar leadership styles except for one important difference: Women tend to have a more democratic leadership style than their male counterparts. The study did not come to a conclusion leadership effectiveness, so we don't know whether the men or women were more successful, nor of the autocratic versus democratic approach. The study also did not evaluate the gender role characteristics of the participants, so it is difficult to compare against the study from the first reading. The study did, however, consider its results to be supportive of the authors' hypothesis that by the time leaders are selected they already have an established similarity in personality and behaviors, so that any dominant difference between the genders must occur befor leader emergence is complete.

Suppose for a moment that these similar phenomena are true; that the reason there are few women in computer science is because we (society) have made programming a masculine job; and that one reason there still exists an imbalance in the number of women vs men in leadership positions is because leadership, or at the minimum *becoming a leader*, is also a masculine job.

How would we as a society redesign these jobs to correct the imbalance? Can we reduce the "masculinity requirement"? Or can we incorporate more emphasis on traditionally feminine characteristics (sociability, communication, consideration) into these roles to give women a more even footing? Is such a thing even desirable?

meekay @ 2008-02-10T00:06:00

2008-02-10T05:06:43Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7237119.stm

I've been there. I liked it.
It's gone now.

STS-122

2008-02-07T19:04:11Z

The space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to launch today at 2:45:30pm EST. Live video is available here:

http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1369080&segment=149773

Currently, they're concerned about a thunderstorm developing over Orlando, and crosswinds at the KSC landing facility. But for now, at least, they are still "go" for launch.

It looks like they've finally fixed the recurring problem with the engine cutoff (ECO) fuel sensors — all four checked out OK when they filled up the tank this morning.

Auto Show

2008-02-05T20:18:05Z

Kelly and I are planning to hit the Philadelphia Auto Show tomorrow. Anyone else interested?

If you live in one of the 24 Super Tuesday states, get your ass to a polling place. In New Jersey, polls are open until 8pm, and you don't need to be affiliated with a party to vote in a primary. (You'll be automatically affiliated after your ballot is cast.)

Super Tuesday Obamarama

2008-02-02T15:29:58Z

Kelly and I are in Trenton today to work for the Obama campaign. they're somewhat disorganized hre, so right now we're sitting around waiting for someone to show up and give us something to do.

Tomorrow (Sunday), Obama will be in Wilmington DE for a rally at 1pm. We're thinking about going to that as well, but we're not sure yet. (Depends partly on how Kelly's knees feel.)

meekay @ 2008-01-31T22:02:00

2008-02-01T03:05:07Z

The best part of the Democratic debate was when they showed Josh Lyman sitting in the audience.

This is a post about the Iowa caucus.

2008-01-04T03:58:51Z

WOOHOO!

Life Imitates Onion

2008-01-03T15:46:44Z

2006: Brash Young Floor Trader Trying To Rally Dow All By Self
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/55941

Yesterday: The man behind the record rise in oil prices to $100 a barrel was a lone trader, seeking bragging rights and a minute of fame, market watchers say.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7169543.stm

Not how I was planning to spend vacation.

2007-12-29T00:30:02Z

vlynn and I were supposed to go to the Dresden Dolls show tonight. But unfortunately I've come down sick with a sore throat and cough. I think I caught it from one of Kelly's relatives while we were in Maryland.

Last night we decided to try an experiment, and brought Kelly's cat Taz over to my place. He was freaked out for the first several hours, but is doing much better now.

Yesterday

2007-12-05T15:58:23Z

... was a pretty crap day.

My officemate, Vlad, is quitting for a better offer somewhere else. That leaves us with only six developers. Three developers are Oracle specialists, two are currently dedicated on the 6.2 release and SAP integration. That leaves only one developer in Java development on the trunk for the 7.0 release, who now also has to take on all of Vlad's work. Guess who that person is?

By the way, we are hiring. If you know a Java/J2EE developer with experience in Struts, and at least a working knowledge of Oracle PL/SQL, please send me an email. Knowledge of AJAX techniques or Hibernate would be a plus.

In home improvement, I'm currently working on about four different projects, none of which are going particularly well. I found some shingles in my front lawn after that windy night we had Monday, but I'm not sure whether they're from my roof or one of my neighbors. I also broke the chain on my skylight vent a few weeks ago, so the winds were causing that to bang all night and letting heat out.

And then last night, while making a trip to Lowe's, I discovered that the windshield on my car is cracked. This after I just spent $1200 for repairs and replacements during my vehicle inspection last month.

Rose Bowl

2007-12-03T04:31:15Z

Do I know anyone with a couch in Pasadena?

If you're not subscribed to news...

2007-12-03T04:21:52Z

LiveJournal has been sold to a Russian company.